Multivocality in World Heritage

This book examines multivocality in 21st-century World Heritage management through an in-depth interdisciplinary exploration of the complexity and plurality of voices on the ground at a specific World Heritage site, offering new perspectives and insights into the established inherent tension between change and heritage conservation.

Through an interdisciplinary approach, the book presents a rich variety of cases grounded in a single World Heritage site, to provide new insights and perspectives on World Heritage as complex local phenomena entangled in global processes. Multivocality and constant change are fundamental to all societies, and must therefore be emphasised and also applied to World Heritage sites, including the UNESCO site under scrutiny in this volume: The Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site in Southern Norway. If World Heritage is to promote shared commitments to both conservation and principles of sustainability, the concept of conservation must acknowledge and accommodate change. Bringing together academic approaches from different disciplines, this edited volume addresses this pressing issue by paying serious attention to local complexities and multiple perspectives on the ground. The cases presented demonstrate the relevance of applying a broader sense of multivocality to improve practices in World Heritage management, policymaking, planning and governance. Multivocality emerges as a perspective attentive to diversity and complexity, questioning reductionism, and challenging monocultural thinking in global World Heritage management, while supporting a more democratic multitude of voices in World Heritage sites, both human and more-than-human.

This book will be of interest to researchers and students in the multidisciplinary field of heritage, heritage policymakers and bureaucrats, international advisory bodies to UNESCO, as well as managers at different levels in the World Heritage arena.